Gravitational Waves Exist: The Inside Story of How Scientists Finally Found Them

Just over a billion years ago, many millions of galaxies from here, a pair of black holes collided. They had been circling each other for aeons, in a sort of mating dance, gathering pace with each orbit, hurtling closer and closer. By the time they were a few hundred miles apart, they were whipping around at nearly the speed of light, releasing great shudders of gravitational energy. Space and time became distorted, like water at a rolling boil. In the fraction of a second that it took for the black holes to finally merge, they radiated a hundred times more energy than all the stars in the universe combined. They formed a new black hole, sixty-two times as heavy as our sun and almost as wide across as the state of Maine. As it smoothed itself out, assuming the shape of a slightly flattened sphere, a few last quivers of energy escaped. Then space and time became silent again.

The waves rippled outward in every direction, weakening as they went. On Earth, dinosaurs arose, evolved, and went extinct. The waves kept going. About fifty thousand years ago, they entered our own Milky Way galaxy, just as Homo sapiens were beginning to replace our Neanderthal cousins as the planet’s dominant species of ape. A hundred years ago, Albert Einstein, one of the more advanced members of the species, predicted the waves’ existence, inspiring decades of speculation and fruitless searching. Twenty-two years ago, construction began on an enormous detector, the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO). Then, on September 14, 2015, at just before eleven in the morning, Central European Time, the waves reached Earth. Marco Drago, a thirty-two-year-old Italian postdoctoral student and a member of the LIGO Scientific Collaboration, was the first person to notice them. He was sitting in front of his computer at the Albert Einstein Institute, in Hannover, Germany, viewing the LIGO data remotely. The waves appeared on his screen as a compressed squiggle, but the most exquisite ears in the universe, attuned to vibrations of less than a trillionth of an inch, would have heard what astronomers call a chirp—a faint whooping from low to high. This morning, in a press conference in Washington, D.C., the LIGO team announced that the signal constitutes the first direct observation of gravitational waves.

When Drago saw the signal, he was stunned. “It was difficult to understand what to do,” he told me. He informed a colleague, who had the presence of mind to call the LIGO operations room, in Livingston, Louisiana. Word began to circulate among the thousand or so scientists involved in the project. In California, David Reitze, the executive director of the LIGO Laboratory, saw his daughter off to school and went to his office, at Caltech, where he was greeted by a barrage of messages. “I don’t remember exactly what I said,” he told me. “It was along these lines: ‘Holy shit, what is this?’ ” Vicky Kalogera, a professor of physics and astronomy at Northwestern University, was in meetings all day, and didn’t hear the news until dinnertime. “My husband asked me to set the table,” she said. “I was completely ignoring him, skimming through all these weird e-mails and thinking, What is going on?” Rainer Weiss, the eighty-three-year-old physicist who first suggested building LIGO, in 1972, was on vacation in Maine. He logged on, saw the signal, and yelled “My God!” loudly enough that his wife and adult son came running.

The collaborators began the arduous process of double-, triple-, and quadruple-checking their data. “We’re saying that we made a measurement that is about a thousandth the diameter of a proton, that tells us about two black holes that merged over a billion years ago,” Reitze said. “That is a pretty extraordinary claim and it needs extraordinary evidence.” In the meantime, the LIGO scientists were sworn to absolute secrecy. As rumors of the finding spread, from late September through this week, media excitement spiked; there were rumblings about a Nobel Prize. But the collaborators gave anyone who asked about it an abbreviated version of the truth—that they were still analyzing data and had nothing to announce. Kalogera hadn’t even told her husband. (...)

LIGO is part of a larger effort to explore one of the more elusive implications of Einstein’s general theory of relativity. The theory, put simply, states that space and time curve in the presence of mass, and that this curvature produces the effect known as gravity. When two black holes orbit each other, they stretch and squeeze space-time like children running in circles on a trampoline, creating vibrations that travel to the very edge; these vibrations are gravitational waves. They pass through us all the time, from sources across the universe, but because gravity is so much weaker than the other fundamental forces of nature—electromagnetism, for instance, or the interactions that bind an atom together—we never sense them. Einstein thought it highly unlikely that they would ever be detected. He twice declared them nonexistent, reversing and then re-reversing his own prediction. A skeptical contemporary noted that the waves seemed to “propagate at the speed of thought.”

by Nicola Twilley, New Yorker |  Read more:

Image: Aleks Sennwald

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The Reality of Missing Out

When it comes to ad-supported services, pundits everywhere are fond of the adage “If you’re not the customer you’re the product”. It’s interesting, though, how quickly that adage is forgotten when it comes to evaluating the viability of said services.

Twitter is a perfect example. In response to my piece How Facebook Squashed Twitter I got a whole host of responses along the lines of this from John Gruber:

I have argued for years that the fundamental problem is that Twitter is compared to Facebook, and it shouldn’t be. Facebook appeals to billions of people. “Most people”, it’s fair to say. Twitter appeals to hundreds of millions of people. That’s amazing, and there’s tremendous value in that — but it’s no Facebook. Cramming extra features into Twitter will never make it as popular as Facebook — it will only dilute what it is that makes Twitter as popular and useful as it is.

From a user’s perspective, I completely agree. But remember the adage: it’s the customers that matter, and from an advertiser’s perspective Facebook and Twitter are absolutely comparable, which is the root of the problem for the latter. Digital advertising is becoming a rather simple proposition: Facebook, Google, or don’t bother.

CONSUMER SERVICE CARNAGE

Last Friday LinkedIn suffered one of the worst days the stock market has ever seen, plummeting 40% despite the fact the company beat expectations for both revenue and adjusted earnings; the slide was prompted by significantly lower guidance than investors expected.

The issue for LinkedIn is that a company’s stock price is not a scorecard; rather it is the market’s estimate of a company’s future earnings, and the ratio to which the stock price varies from current earnings is the degree to which investors expect said earnings to grow. In the case of LinkedIn, the company’s relatively mature core business serving recruiters continues to do well; that’s why the company beat estimates. That market, though, has a natural limit, which means growth must be found elsewhere, and LinkedIn hoped that elsewhere would be in advertising. The lower-than-expected estimates and shuttering of Lead Accelerator, LinkedIn’s off-site advertising program (which follows on the heels of LinkedIn’s previous decision to end display advertising), suggested that said growth may not materialize.

Yelp, meanwhile, was only down 11% yesterday after releasing earnings (and issuing guidance) that weren’t that terrible.

The company’s big hit came last summer when the stock plummeted 28% in a single day on, you guessed it, a lower-than-expected forecast, based in part on Yelp’s decision to end its brand advertising program.

Yahoo’s core business, meanwhile, is practically worthless as revenues and earnings continue to decline, and the aforementioned Twitter has seen its valuation slump below $10 billion; both are in stark contrast to the companies each has traditionally been associated with: Google is worth $460 billion (and was briefly the most valuable company in the world) and Facebook is worth $267 billion.

The reason for such a stark bifurcation is, ultimately, all about the “customer”: the advertiser actually buying the ads that underly all of these “free” consumer services.

by Ben Thompson, Stratechery |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

What Depression Is Really Like

In a piercing letter to his brother, Vincent van Gogh captured the mental anguish of depression in a devastatingly perfect visceral metaphor: “One feels as if one were lying bound hand and foot at the bottom of a deep dark well, utterly helpless.” Anyone who has suffered from this debilitating disease knows that the water in that well is qualitatively, biochemically different from the water in the puddle of mere sadness. And yet, even as scientists are exploring the evolutionary origins of depression and the role REM sleep may play in it, understanding and articulating the experience of the disease remains a point of continual frustration for those afflicted and a point of continual perplexity for those fortunate never to have plummeted to the bottom of the well.

No one has captured this perennial plague of the human spirit with greater vividness and acuity than William Styron (June 11, 1925–November 1, 2006) in Darkness Visible (public library) — his trenchant 1990 memoir of depression.

Styron, who first descended into clinical depression at the age of sixty and describes himself as “one who has suffered from the malady in extremis yet returned to tell the tale,” considers the cultural baggage of this “veritable howling tempest in the brain,” propelled by “the intermingled factors of abnormal chemistry, behavior and genetics”:

When I was first aware that I had been laid low by the disease, I felt a need, among other things, to register a strong protest against the word “depression.” Depression, most people know, used to be termed “melancholia,” a word which appears in English as early as the year 1303 and crops up more than once in Chaucer, who in his usage seemed to be aware of its pathological nuances. “Melancholia” would still appear to be a far more apt and evocative word for the blacker forms of the disorder, but it was usurped by a noun with a bland tonality and lacking any magisterial presence, used indifferently to describe an economic decline or a rut in the ground, a true wimp of a word for such a major illness. It may be that the scientist generally held responsible for its currency in modern times, a Johns Hopkins Medical School faculty member justly venerated — the Swiss-born psychiatrist Adolf Meyer — had a tin ear for the finer rhythms of English and therefore was unaware of the semantic damage he had inflicted by offering “depression” as a descriptive noun for such a dreadful and raging disease. Nonetheless, for over seventy-five years the word has slithered innocuously through the language like a slug, leaving little trace of its intrinsic malevolence and preventing, by its very insipidity, a general awareness of the horrible intensity of the disease when out of control.

One of the most striking paradoxes of the disease is that despite its devastating prevalence — depression is the most common form of disability in the world today — its symptoms are so imperceptible from the outside that it is extremely difficult to tell who is suffering and who is not. And yet what goes on inside is acute and unmistakable.

by Maria Popova, Brain Pickings |  Read more:
Image: William Styron

Inside the Surreal, Self-Invented World of Pamela Anderson

I first meet Pamela Anderson on a Tuesday. She's posing on the deck of a mid-century house in Beachwood Canyon, in the low hills of Hollywood, as afternoon fades gently into evening. It's hard to say what's more striking, when I first walk into the house: Pamela Anderson, or the light on the deck, golden as only LA light can be at the end of a clear afternoon. Beneath the sky, a band of grey smog hangs on the horizon—under that, the creeping 101, the spindly marquees of hotels.

Pamela is wearing black lingerie and a trench coat, and her hair is groomed into a neat bob. All day, she's been a fantasy out of Hitchcock or Fellini: She's posed in tears with a pistol, in silk pajamas, taking drags from ultra-thin Capris while clasping an oversized cordless phone in a convincing semblance of panic. When the camera is doing its work, the small army of assistants, stylists, hair people, and hangers-on all fall silent. All I can hear is the beep-click of the shutter and Lana Del Rey on the stereo, for mood.

It's not right to say she is unrecognizable in the photos being taken; she is Pamela Anderson. But she looks small for someone so much larger than life, and somehow modest, miles away from the beach-bronzed rock 'n' roll goddess I was expecting. It's a strange effect. The Pamela Anderson that comes up when I google her name, all smudged eyeliner and wild chemical blonde, feels like another woman. It feels like an invention. In my time with Pamela—beginning here and ending ten hours later, dazed, in an Uber winding back down the hills—I will learn that the line between invention and reality is porous.

As I'm waiting to speak with her, night falls. An assistant pulls the photographer aside. "I'm going to get wine," she whispers, "what should I get?" Rosé, chardonnay, champagne; the consultation spreads to Pamela. "Goldschläger?" she jokes. That's how she met her first husband, Mötley Crüe drummer Tommy Lee—she sent him a shot of Goldschläger from across a Las Vegas bar. He licked her face and they were married not long afterward, a modern-day fairytale, on the beach in Cancun, the bride in a white bikini. Their union was catnip to paparazzi, and the Anderson-Lees were rarely out of tabloids throughout the mid-1990s, inadvertently creating the celebrity sex tape genre before bearing two children and divorcing. Much of what I know about Pamela Anderson before meeting her is colored by the vivid imagery of this era, which I absorbed at an impressionable age. The assistant goes for rosé.

The segue from shot to matrimony sounds improbable, but that's the way Pamela tells stories: as impressionistic collages of names, moments, and places, sometimes daisy-chained into breathless sequences. Each is like a little flower arrangement. David LaChapelle, Las Vegas, bathrobes, glitter on her skin, "visiting Elton in his room." That's how she lives, too. She doesn't have a manager, or an agent; she never really has—"they just give up on me," she says. Instead, she meets people, follows her instincts, gets into pickles, unpickles herself, picks up, moves on. She claims to be both unmanageable and suggestible, demonstrating a combination of freewheeling courage and guilelessness that has led her to who she is today: a newly-single sex symbol pushing 50 with a rolodex full of artist friends and two adult sons, entering what she calls "Chapter Two" of her career. (,,,)

Pamela became a celebrity in a different age. Although hounded by paparazzi during her rocky and very public marriages to Tommy Lee and briefly, Kid Rock, she retained some measure of inaccessibility. Her heirs to the throne of tabloid notoriety have no such luxury, nor do they desire it. The celebs created by Instagram and YouTube became famous to be seen; what's the point of privacy? Now that every would-be Kardashian can send out a constant, direct-to-consumer stream of staged intimacy and selfies, access—the longtime currency of fame—has been upended. Pamela, whose image was ubiquitous before ubiquity could be juiced with retweets, is left in the strange position of having to renegotiate the nature of her own public image.

by Claire Evans, Vice | Read more:
Image: Tucker Tripp

Los Punks

[ed. See also: LIVINGOFFTHEWALL]

The Knife Room (West Anaheim Medical Center)
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Nenad Bacanovic

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Gillian Welch & David Rawlings

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Bad Decision

Aaron Rodgers sits with San Francisco 49ers head coach Mike Nolan as Dr. Harry Edwards takes notes during an NFL Scouting Combine interview held at the Crowne Plaza Hotel on Feb. 27, 2005 in Indianapolis. Two months later at the NFL Draft, Nolan and the Niners selected Alex Smith with the No. 1 pick. Rodgers was the next QB taken at No. 24 by Green Bay. A four-time Pro Bowl quarterback and Super Bowl XLV MVP, Rodgers turned 32 years old on Dec. 2, 2015. (Todd Rosenberg for SI)
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What Is Blockchain?

Known by many as the technology underpinning the bitcoin digital currency, blockchain has acquired a new identity in the enterprise. At a time when companies face new challenges in data management and security, it’s emerging as a way to let companies make and verify transactions on a network instantaneously without a central authority. Today, more than 40 top financial institutions and a growing number of firms across industries are experimenting with distributed ledger technology as a secure and transparent way to digitally track the ownership of assets, a move that could speed up transactions and cut costs while lowering the risk of fraud. Some companies see an opportunity to use blockchain to track the movement of assets throughout their supply chains or electronically initiate and enforce contracts.

Blockchain remains in the experimental phase inside many large firms and there are few tested use cases, experts and analysts caution. Here’s a look at how this emerging technology works:

What is blockchain?

A blockchain is a data structure that makes it possible to create a digital ledger of transactions and share it among a distributed network of computers. It uses cryptography to allow each participant on the network to manipulate the ledger in a secure way without the need for a central authority.

Once a block of data is recorded on the blockchain ledger, it’s extremely difficult to change or remove. When someone wants to add to it, participants in the network — all of which have copies of the existing blockchain — run algorithms to evaluate and verify the proposed transaction. If a majority of nodes agree that the transaction looks valid — that is, identifying information matches the blockchain’s history — then the new transaction will be approved and a new block added to the chain.

The term blockchain today usually describes a version of this distributed ledger structure and distributed consensus process. There are different blockchain configurations that use different consensus mechanisms, depending on the type and size of the network and the use case of a particular company. The bitcoin blockchain, for example, is public and “permissionless”, meaning anyone can participate and contribute to the ledger. Many firms also are exploring private or “permissioned” blockchains whose network is made up only of known participants. Each of these blockchain implementations operate in different ways.

Guardtime, a company that sells blockchain-based products and services to enterprises and governments including Ericsson AB and the country of Estonia, explained its approach like this:

Assume an organization has 10 transactions per second. Each of those transactions receives its own digital signature. Using a tree structure, those signatures are combined and given a single digital fingerprint — a unique representation of those transactions at a specific time. That fingerprint is sent up the tree to the next layer of infrastructure, such as a service provider or telecom company. This process happens for every organization in the network until there is a single digital fingerprint that encompasses all the transactions as they existed during that particular second. Once validated, that fingerprint is stored in a blockchain that all the participants can see. A copy of that ledger is also sent back to each organization to store locally. Those signatures can be continuously verified against what is in the blockchain, giving companies a way to monitor the state and integrity of a particular asset or transaction.

Anytime a change to data or an asset is proposed, a new, unique digital fingerprint is created, Guardtime said. That fingerprint is sent to each client node for validation. If the fingerprints don’t match, or if the change to the data doesn’t fit with the network’s agreed-upon rules, the transaction may not be validated. This setup means the entire network, rather than a central authority, is responsible for ensuring the validity of each transaction.

by Arvind Krishna, WSJ |  Read more:

Image: Oliver Wyman

Fentanyl: Drug 50 Times More Potent Than Heroin Ravages New Hampshire

Officer Shaun McKennedy’s first overdose call comes in at 6.39pm. He turns the sirens on and rushes over to 245 Laurel street, a midsize apartment building. There’s an abandoned baby carriage in the front yard. A man wearing a Bride of Chucky shirt peeps out of his doorway as McKennedy, 24, rushes upstairs.

Several men from the local fire department and EMT department are already there, hovering around the seemingly lifeless body of a 31-year-old man on the living room floor in a soaking wet T-shirt and jeans. It’s a situation McKennedy, 24, has been through dozens of times since he joined the force last July.

“Larry! Larry! Stay with us!” yells Justin Chase, a Manchester EMT medic. He injects naloxone, a medication that reverses the effects of opioids, up Larry’s nose.

His body shakes and his eyes pop open. “What’s up?” he asks, without blinking.

Larry agrees to go to the emergency room at Elliot hospital, but it will be several weeks before test results determine exactly what led to his overdose. It’s the first time he’s done that, he tells McKennedy later that night. Usually he injects between two and three grams of heroin a day; that evening he only took 0.2 grams, or a “pencil”. He’s not sure if he overdosed because he lost his tolerance – he says he’s been clean for just over two months – or if it was laced with fentanyl.

According to the Drug Enforcement Administration, fentanyl is a synthetic opioid 100 times more powerful than morphine, and 30-50 times more powerful than heroin.

“Fentanyl is what is killing our citizens,” said Manchester’s chief of police, Nick Willard, in testimony before Congress last week. (...)

“It’s not like Mario Batali,” said Willard from his office in Manchester, comparing heroin dealers cutting their supply with the famed chef. “These guys are just throwing it in a mixer. You could get a bag that’s perfect and no one is going to die from it. You could also get a bag [that’s] straight fentanyl and that would kill you.”

Willard said that during a recent raid in Manchester, he found a dealer mixing fentanyl with whey protein. In another sting that led to a seizure in Lawrence, Massachusetts, the dealer was allegedly mixing heroin and fentanyl in a kitchen blender.

For the most part, said Willard, the story of opiate use in Manchester follows the same patterns as the rest of the country. The crisis was ushered in by the rise of prescription painkillers like OxyContin. Addicts looking for a cheaper high frequently turned to the more dangerous, yet significantly cheaper, heroin. (...)

To make matters worse for Manchester, DEA agent Tim Desmond says intelligence indicates that Mexican cartels, specifically El Chapo’s Sinaloa cartel, have increased poppy production 50% since last year and have been targeting the north-east.

Fentanyl was first developed in the 1960s as a general anesthetic, and it is still regularly administered by doctors, usually in the form of lozenges and patches, frequently for cancer patients.

Addicts have found ways to abuse the prescription forms of the drug, by sucking on the patches, for example. But more recently, Mexican cartels have learned how to make their own fentanyl by importing the necessary chemicals from China, then smuggling the product across the border and on to the interstate highway system, said Desmond.

by Susan Zalkind, The Guardian |  Read more:

Image: Alamy

What's a Yieldco and How's it Killing Wall Street?

On August 6, billionaire hedge fund manager Leon Cooperman took the unusual step of dialing into an earnings call for one of his fund's holdings and asking a question.

It was a second-quarter earnings call for SunEdison, a solar-energy company that went public in 1995. At the time, Omega was the 11th-biggest shareholder of SunEdison, with 8.8 million shares.

It's a large stake, but it is still unusual for Cooperman to pick up the phone to publicly ask a question on a company's quarterly conference call.

These were no ordinary circumstances, however. After enjoying the benefits of a classic Wall Street hedge fund pile-in – when the smartest money in the stock market wants nothing more than to buy, buy, buy – SunEdison was crashing.

Cooperman wanted to know if its executives would throw him and other investors a bone and buy back some stock. They responded, in no uncertain terms, that they would not.

Since that call, SunEdison's stock has fallen a further 80%. Its two subsidiaries, TerraForm Global and TerraForm Power, have seen their stocks fall 64% and 73%, respectively. There have been management shake-ups at both the subsidiaries.

The stock price collapses have burned some of the biggest investors in the business, including Cooperman, David Einhorn of Greenlight Capital, and David Tepper of Appaloosa Management.

And it is all because of doubts over a type of financial engineering that fueled explosive growth in the solar sector for two years, and now has investors questioning the entire sector.

What's a yieldco?

The shift in fortunes has been brutal. At an event in October last year, David Einhorn of Greenlight Capital called SunEdison "a well‐run, financially savvy company, benefiting from an open-ended growth opportunity trading at a bargain price."

He priced the stock at $32 a share. It's now trading at about $3.

The "open-ended growth opportunity" Einhorn was referring to is made possible by something called a "yieldco." It's the magical instrument that fueled SunEdison's growth and caught Wall Street's eye in the first place.

by Linette Lopez, Business Insider |  Read more:

Image: Carlos Barria/Reuters

Introduction Into an Obscurity

There is nothing more hopeless in this world than the so-called Southwestern Regional Bus Station in Nanjing on May 5, 2002, shortly before seven o’clock in the drizzling rain and the unappeasable icy wind, as, in the vast chaos of the buses departing from the bays of this station, a regional bus, starting from the No. 5 bus stop, slowly ploughs onward—among the other buses and the puddles and the bewildered crowd of wretched, stinking, grimy people—up to the vortex of the street, then sets off into the wretched, stinking, grimy streets; there is nothing more hopeless than these streets, than these interminable barracks on either side, numbed into their own provisional eternity, because there is no word for this hopeless color, for this slowly murderous variation of brown and gray, as it spreads over the city this morning, there is no word for the assault of this hopeless din, if the bus pauses briefly at a larger intersection or a bus stop, and the female conductor with her worn features opens the door, leans out, and, hoping for a new passenger, shouts out the destination like a hoarse falcon; because there is no word which in its essence could convey whether the direction in which he now travels with his companion, his interpreter, exists in relation to the world; they are headed outward, moving away from it, the world is ever farther and farther away, ever more behind them; they are shaken, jolted in advance in the disconsolate brown and yellow of this ever-thicker, indescribable fog; headed to where it can hardly be believed that there could be anything beyond the brown and the gray of this frighteningly dreary mixture; they sit at the back of the ramshackle bus, they are dressed for May but for a different May, so they are chilled and they shiver and they try to look out of the window but they can hardly see through the grimy glass, so they just keep repeating to themselves: Fine, good, it’s all right, they can somehow put up with this situation, not to be eaten up from without and within by this grimy and hopeless fog is their only hope; and that where they are going exists, that where this bus is supposedly taking them—one of the most sacred Buddhist mountains, Jiuhuashan*—exists.

The woman at the ticket counter said that the trip would be roughly four hours, and then, just to be helpful, she added—tilting her head a little by way of explanation—that, well, what she meant was four or four and a half, from which it could already be suspected just what kind of bus they would be boarding; it has, however, just now, after the first hour, become obvious that no one really knows how long, because there is no way of knowing how much time it will take to get to Jiuhuashan, because the journey is slowed down by so many unforeseeable obstacles and chance occurrences—and everything, particularly the weather, is completely unpredictable— unforeseeable obstacles and chance occurrences which, as a matter of fact, are unforeseeable only to them as, for the most part, the personnel—the driver and the conductor—are to be thanked for all these unforeseeable obstacles and chance occurrences, the driver and the conductor, who—as it becomes clear soon after leaving the city—regard the task before them as their own private business venture, and so come to a halt not only at the prescribed stops but almost everywhere, trying to pick up more and more passengers from among the people walking along the side of the highway, from one kilometer to the next it is practically a hunt for yet more passengers, passengers with whom—following a negotiation which is opaque to them, because hardly a word is spoken—some kind of agreement is settled upon in a moment, money flashes in one hand, then disappears in another, on this ever-more congested route, therefore, black-market transport is taking place, that is, the front of the bus is packed, as is the middle, because hardly anyone is sitting at the back, to where they have been squeezed, no, they haven’t gone mad, it is much colder here, because the warmth of what is no doubt the sole operational heating device near the driver’s seat doesn’t reach this far, so that, in the battle for seats, only the weak and the less exceptional end up here—what rotten bad luck, the two Europeans shivering in the artificial-leather seats keep repeating to themselves, that they’re in Nanjing and it’s May and yet it’s almost like February. As for speaking, there really isn’t anyone to speak to, because their Chinese traveling companions, otherwise always inclined to acquaintance and conversation—including the four people who have also ended up at the back—do not breathe a word, neither to one another nor to them, everyone sits as far away as they can from everyone else, cocooned in their coats, scarves and hats, after they have arranged their packages near their feet and on the seat next to them, they just stare wordlessly through the grimy glass out into the brown-gray fog in which no one has any idea at all where they are, because, although it is already certain that they have disappeared into the endless terrain lying to the southwest of Nanjing, it is simply impossible to determine how far they have come and how far they have yet to go; Stein observes the passing of time on his watch, and he can feel that this is going to last for a very long time, for so long that it will no longer matter how long, really, if it will be four or four and a half hours, because none of this means anything in terms of time—the bus makes a huge thud in the thick traffic on the pothole-blotched road, and the entire metal contraption shakes and rattles and throws them here and there in the ice-cold seats, but they doggedly move onward, in blind faith; and beside them on the side of the highway, piled high with their huge bundles, plastic bags, really, all those innumerable people: they are headed somewhere too, they are also going onward, walking in a row, leaning into the icy drizzling wind, into the rain, and only some of them motion yes to the shouting conductor leaning out of the bus, and they get on and it’s as if the rest of them don’t even hear the shouting, they just simply pull back a little from the road until the bus rumbles off from alongside this ghostly procession, then they step back onto the asphalt and continue trudging beneath the weight of the bundles and the bags, clearly with that same blind faith, just like the travelers up there in the bus—as the bus pulls away, splashing them with mud—as if there were some common reason for this faith, as if in the absurdity of this balefully obscure scene, in which there really is nothing at all, it would be enough just to believe that, today, everyone will reach their goal.

The watch on Stein’s wrist shows nine minutes past eight when, in a bend hardly a hundred meters from the intersection of three main highways, the driver suddenly brakes, and picks up, from the mud on the side of the road, a middle-aged woman, clearly waiting for this bus: from this point on, that part of the journey begins in which they can no longer hide from each other the thought that perhaps they did not thoroughly consider all the difficulties inherent in their plan of going to Jiuhuashan—that is, is the risk worth it when the goal of travel is so uncertain?—because surely, says Stein to his sleepy companion, still shivering in the cold, both of them, the two white Europeans, cannot understand anything of this at all, they cannot even understand how a bus route like this operates: how could this woman know that she had to wait here, and how could the bus driver know that this woman would be waiting exactly here, in this bend in the road, and at exactly this time, let’s say, at around eight o’clock, because you can’t speak about schedules at all, that’s how it is, it’s impossible to understand anything here, the interpreter nods in agreement a little anxiously, and so this, says Stein, is just one of the many functioning rules, unknown to them, just a mere fragment of the entire system upon which they are relying, and which somehow still continues to exist...

by László Krasznahorkai, Paris Review | Read more:
Image: From the cover of Destruction and Sorrow Beneath the Heavens

[ed. Traveling. Posts will be sporadic for a few days.]

Carrie Gundersdorf, Leftover Trees #1. 2011
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Mother's Day

The trees along Pine Street that every spring bloomed purple flowers had bloomed purple flowers. So what? What was the big deal? It happened every spring. Pammy kept saying, “Look at the flowers, Ma. Ain’t them flowers amazing?” The kids were trying to kiss up. Paulie had flown in, and Pammy had taken her to Mother’s Day lunch and now was holding her hand. Holding her hand! Right on Pine. The girl who once slapped her own mother for attempting to adjust her collar.

Pammy said, “Ma, these flowers, wow, they really blow me away.”

Just like Pammy to take her mother to lunch in a sweatshirt with a crossed-out picture of a machine gun on it. What about a nice dress? Or pants suit? At least this time Pammy and Paulie hadn’t been on her about the smoking. Even back when Pammy was taking harp, even back when Paulie’s hair was long and he was dating that Eileen, even after Eileen slept around and Paulie shaved his head, whenever Paulie and Pammy came over they were always on her about the smoking. Which was rude. They had no right. When their father was alive they wouldn’t have dared. When Pammy slapped her hand for adjusting her collar, Paul, Sr., had given her such a wallop.

The town looked nice. The flags were flying.

“Ma, did you like your lunch?” Pammy said.

“I liked it fine,” Alma said.

At least she didn’t have an old-lady voice. She just had her same voice, like when she was young and nobody had looked better in a tight dress going for cocktails.

“Ma, I know what,” Pammy said. “How about we walk up Pickle Street?”

What was Pammy trying to do? Cripple her? They’d been out for two hours already. Paulie’d slept late and missed lunch. He’d just flown in and, boy, were his arms tired. Paul, Sr., had always said that after a trip. Paulie had not said that. Paulie not having his father’s wit. Plus it looked like rain. Black-blue clouds were hanging over the canal bridge.

“We’re going home,” she said. “You can drive me out to the grave.”

“Ma,” Pammy said. “We’re not going to the grave, remember?”

“We are,” she said.

At the grave she’d say, Paul, dear, everything came out all right. Paulie flew in and Pammy held my hand, and for once they laid off the smoking crap.

They were passing the Manfrey place. Once, in the Nixon years, lightning had hit the Manfrey cupola. In the morning a portion of cupola lay on the lawn. She’d walked by with Nipper. Paul, Sr., did not walk Nipper. Walking Nipper being too early. Paul, Sr., had been a bit of a drinker. Paul, Sr., drank a bit with great sophistication. At that time, Paul, Sr., was selling a small device used to stimulate tree growth. You attached it to a tree and supposedly the tree flourished. When Paul, Sr., drank a bit with great sophistication he made up lovely words and sometimes bowed. This distinguished-looking gentleman would appear at your door somewhat sloshed and ask, Were your trees slaggard? Were they gublagging behind the other trees? Did they need to be prodderated? And hold up the little device. In this way they had nearly lost the house. Paul, Sr., was charming. But off-putting. In the sales sense. The efficacy of his tree stimulators was nebulous. Paul, Sr., had said so in his low drunk voice on the night that it had appeared most certain they would lose the house.

“Mother,” he’d said. “The efficacy of my tree stimulators is nebulous.”

“Ma,” Pammy said.

“What?” Alma snapped. “What do you want?”

“You stopped,” Pammy said.

“Don’t you think I know it?” she said. “My knees hurt. Daughter dragging me all over town.”

She had not known it. She knew it now, however. They were opposite the shop where the men used to cut pipe. Now it was a Lean&Fit. The time they nearly lost the house, Paulie had come to their bed with a cup of pennies. He was bald these days and sold ad space in the PennySaver. Pammy worked at No Animals Need Die. That was the actual name. Place smelled like hemp. On the shirts and hats for sale were cartoons of cows saying things like “Thanks for Not Slamming a Bolt Through My Head.”

And as children they’d been so bright. She remembered Paulie’s Achievement Award. One boy had wept when he didn’t get one. But Paulie’d got one. Yet they’d turned out badly. Worked dumb jobs and had never married and were always talking about their feelings.

Something had spoiled Paulie and Pammy. Well, it wasn’t her. She’d always been firm. Once, she’d left them at the zoo for disobeying. When she’d told them to stop feeding the giraffe they’d continued. She’d left them at the zoo and gone for a cocktail, and when she returned Pammy and Paulie were standing repentant at the front gate, zoo balloons deflated. That had been a good lesson in obedience. A month later, at Ed Pedloski’s funeral, when, with a single harsh look, she’d ordered them to march past the open coffin, they’d marched past the open coffin lickety-split, no shenanigans.

Poor Ed had looked terrible, having been found after several days on his kitchen floor.

“Ma, you O.K.?” Pammy said.

“Don’t be ridiculous,” Alma said.

In the early days she and Paul, Sr., had done it every which way. Afterward they’d lie on the floor discussing what colors to paint the walls. But then the children came. And they were bad. They cried and complained, they pooped at idiotic random times, they stepped on broken glass, they’d wake from their naps and pull down the window shades as she lay on the floor with Paul, Sr., not yet having done it any which way, and she’d have to rise exasperated, which would spoil everything, and when she came back Paul, Sr., would be out in the distant part of the yard having a minuscule perschnoggle.

Soon Paul, Sr., was staying out all night. Who could blame him? Home was no fun. Due to Pammy and Paulie. Drastic measures were required. She bought the wildest underthings. Started smoking again. Once, she let Paul, Sr., spank her bare bottom as she stood in just heels at the refrigerator. Once, in the yard, she crouched down, schnockered, waiting to leap out at Paul, Sr. And, leaping out, found him pantsless. That was part of it. The craziness. Part of their grand love. Like when she’d find Paul, Sr., passed out on the porch and have to help him to bed. That was also part of their grand love. Even that time he very funnily called her Milly. One night she and Paul, Sr., stood outside, at a window, drinks in hand, watching Paulie and Pammy wander from room to room, frantically trying to find them. That had—that had been in fun. That had been funny. When they finally went back in, the kids were so relieved. Pammy burst into tears, and Paulie began pounding Paul, Sr., so fiercely in the groin with his tiny fists that he had to be sent to—

Well, he certainly had not been sent to sleep in the garden shed in the dark of night. As he always claimed. They would not have done that. They had—probably they’d laughed it off. In their free-spirited way. Then sent him to bed. For hitting. After which, probably, he’d run out and hidden in that shed. Rebelliously. They’d searched and searched. Searching and searching, heroically, they’d finally found him in the shed, sleeping naughtily across a fertilizer bag, tears streaking the dirt on his—

Why had he been crying when he was supposedly hiding rebelliously?

That was all a long time ago.

She wasn’t getting in the fricking time machine about it.

by George Saunders, New Yorker |  Read more:

Image: Jeff Bark